Chapter Twenty Five
2:30 a.m. doesn’t feel like the middle of the night anymore.
I can feel the sun on the opposite side of the earth, the faint burn of daylight in China, the sunrise over the wasteland deserts of Russia. I can feel the cool creep of night settling over New York City. I can smell someone’s armpits, four miles away. I can taste stale cigarettes and dried-up beer and the rancid food forgotten in the back of someone’s refrigerator. I can smell motor oil and antifreeze and salt off the highways. I can smell the stink of the high school locker rooms and the molded damp stench of the library and the bleach they use to clean the floor at the police station.
The reek of the garbage dump on the far side of town? Unbearable.
The smoke from the logging mills way out by the county line? Suffocating.
I’m on the porch, tasting the air, when Edward reappears.
He comes through the trees at the far end of the clearing, dragging a body of something large and hairy and antlered. I can’t even swallow the thought of it, even as my stomach is gnawing into itself but I’m so hungry I could drain that thing, drain a couple of those things, maybe even twenty of them, and then I’m there with my fingers to fur and my nose to hide and my mouth latched onto a warm, wet hole in the side of an elk.
I come up with a gasp.
“Woah. Hungry?” Edward is standing a few feet away, hands in his pockets, grin on his face like he just watched a monkey in a vest do an amusing trick, instead of some girl going to town on the local wildlife.
“Yes. Don’t laugh at me.” I stand, feeling suddenly unsteady, the slosh of blood in my stomach louder than the roar of the ocean. I wipe my face, certain I’m just making it worse, wishing I was smoother or cuter or at least better at covering all my awkwardness up with a cool new vampire veneer. Instead, I’m faster and stronger and sleeker but somehow just as odd as I’ve ever been.
“I’m not laughing. I just did the same thing to three of those.” He waves his hand absently at the elk, now looking a little more limp than it was at first sight. Of course there’s not a drop of blood on him.
Asshole.
“Your appetite will start to increase, the older you get. It will take more and more to sustain you.”
“I thought I wouldn’t age?” I kick at the side of the elk, now cool and starting to harden. I can’t help but think about all the dead body research I did for Alice and how it was just natural, the shift from soft and warm to hard and cold.
“Not technically. But you’ll still find yourself marking the time that passes.” Edward’s voice drops at the end, as though the thought alone is sad enough.
“How old are you, then?”
“Too old for you,” he laughs. “If you knew, you’d think I was disgusting.”
Probably not. I shake my head. “You don’t look a day over seventeen.”
“Illusion. And good genes.”
Edward needs to run off some steam. At least that’s how he puts it. I think maybe he needs some time alone but doesn’t know how to tell me. He’s looked even more drawn and pensive ever since the whole Alice fiasco. Worried and tortured ever since the whole biting me thing went down. He tells me he’ll be back in two hours, and I wonder how far he can run in that time. Probably clear up to Alaska and back.
When he’s gone, I look for Alice’s room.
I know it’s close by. I can smell it, the timid taste of her in the air. She lived with him for three years, and it smells like violets. Brown sugar. Baby angel tears with a healthy dose of demonic possession. It’s so strong, I’m either hallucinating the faint purple cloud wafting down the long dark hallway, or it’s actually there; I’m not sure which option to be more intrigued by.
I try every door, but only the one at the far end of the hall straight across from Edward’s own bedroom isn’t. I open that door to the set of a horror movie.
In this dank old house, all molded grey and shadowed black, there is a room of little girl carnage.
Like Alice’s room at home but so much worse.
The wallpaper is still pink, despite sun-faded age, printed with gold foil filigree and velveteen flowers, all mauve and rose and pastel peach. There’s lace draped over the windows and canopying the bed and shading the lamps, all of it brittle and yellowing. There’s a musty white bedspread and a rag rug sewn with roses. There’s a pale pink vanity, with tarnished handles and a webbed mirror, spider-veined by a fist or old age. A trio of creepy plastic dolls sits slumped on the window seat with tangled hair, empty eyes, and frozen smiles.
Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust. I shuffle into the room, a feeling of dread rising in my throat. Alice’s stuffed leopard, the one that is more grey than pink, is lying abandoned on the bed. It’s smiling, despite the fact that it’s been left behind, and I wonder if she even cared that I brought it to her. I pick up the leopard, hold it close as I examine the top of the dresser nearby, littered with hair trinkets and a creaky old jewelry box that doesn’t play music anymore. A hair brush with long blonde hair wrapped up in it and a brittle bouquet of cornflowers so old, they disintegrate when I touch them.
The closet is full of clothing. Dresses. High necks and long sleeves and knee-length hemlines. Sashes and pinafores and petticoats. Horizontal lace and vertical chambray and built-in whalebone. All of them child-sized.
This isn’t just Alice’s room.
Nothing here is new enough to belong only to her.
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